On Tuesday we held the first of of our Entrepreneur Academe expert sessions at the Tech City offices of our partners Thomson Reuters. It was attended by our entrepreneur cohort as well as about 20 of our mentors. In this session we looked at all the basics that need to be in place in order to scale a business: legal/regulatory/compliance, finance/governance, HR/culture/leadership and boards/reporting/KPIs.

The afternoon kicked off with a panel discussion with Roberta Draper from City law firm Kingsley Napley, Mark Pattenden and Mel Pittas from accountancy firm haysmacintyre, and recruitment expert Lauren Hine, founder of Zealify and an alumnus of the first Entrepreneur Academe.

Questions came thick and fast from our entrepreneurs, the first was on using options to incentivise staff. The Enterprise Management Scheme (EMI) is by far the most efficient and flexible way to do this for a small company and there’s a detailed explanation of how it works on the